Reflections on Esoteric Hegemony in Medieval Japan and the Modern Academy

In premodern Japan, legitimization of power and knowledge in various contexts was sanctioned by consecration rituals ( kanjō ) of Buddhist origin. This is the first book to address in a comprehensive way the multiple forms and aspects of these rituals also in relation to other Asian contexts. The multidisciplinary chapters in the book address the origins of these rituals in ancient Persia and India and their developments in China and Tibet, before discussing in depth their transformations in medieval Japan. In particular, kanjō rituals are examined from various perspectives: imperial ceremonies, Buddhist monastic rituals, vernacular religious forms (Shugendō mountain cults, Shinto lineages), rituals of bodily transformation involving sexual practice, and the performing arts: a history of these developments, descriptions of actual rituals, and reference to religious and intellectual arguments based on under-examined primary sources. No other book presents so many cases of kanjō in such depth and breadth. This book is relevant to readers interested in Buddhist studies, Japanese religions, the history of Japanese culture, and in the intersections between religious doctrines, rituals, legitimization, and performance.

Reviewed by: Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kūkai and Dōgen on the Art of Enlightenment by Pamela D. Winfield Fabio Rambelli (bio) Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism: Kūkai and Dōgen on the Art of Enlightenment. By Pamela D. Winfield. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013. xx, 207 pages. £70.00, cloth; £18.99, paper. Generally speaking, one could argue that mainstream Japanese Buddhism is constituted, at least since the fourteenth century, by a triangulation of [End Page 480] Esoteric Buddhism, Zen, and Pure Land Buddhism. Each of these traditions has its own distinctive doctrinal discourse, vocabulary, ritual system, and soteriology; they also developed different visual cultures and systems of objects. Of course, these three traditions are not monolithic and separate entities: we can observe both important overlaps among them and significant differences within each tradition. Examples of overlaps include Esoteric (mikkyō) interpretations of Pure Land teachings (as in so-called “secret nenbutsu” or himitsu nenbutsu) and Shingon and Tendai adoptions of Zen vocabulary. The latter especially concern sudden enlightenment but also Pure Land adoptions of Esoteric ideas in heterodoxical sects (variously called ichinengi, hijibōmon, and ianjin) and mainstream Zen acceptance of Esoteric Buddhist ritual formulas (mantras and dhāraṇῑ). Examples of internal differences include the division of each tradition into several competing denominations: Esoteric Buddhism into Shingon and Tendai, Zen into Sōto and Rinzai, and Pure Land into Yūzū Nenbutsu, Jōdo, Jōdo Shinshū, and Jishū—each further divided into subsects separated by doctrinal and ritual differences. To further complicate the picture, this triangulation is enriched by interaction with other Buddhist traditions, both older (as in the so-called six Nara schools) and more recent (as in Buddhist “new religions”), as well as non-Buddhist religions and intellectual discourses (Confucianism, Shintō, Christianity, modern science, etc.). This situation makes it exceedingly difficult to talk about “Japanese Buddhism” in a unified and coherent way. As a result, scholars in Japan and elsewhere have chosen not to discuss Japanese Buddhism in general but to focus instead on specific denominations, with the assumption that their denomination of choice is representative of Japanese Buddhism as a whole. For the past 30 years or so, such a sectarian approach to Japanese Buddhism has been supplanted by studies of each of these three large traditions (Esoteric Buddhism, Zen, and Pure Land) in their ramifications, but comparative studies across the triangulation are virtually nonexistent. The rare studies of more general scope avoid systematic, in-depth comparisons across these three traditions in favor of presenting separate instances of similar phenomena within them. Another factor that complicates the study of Buddhism as a general cultural system is the structure and division of academic disciplines. Buddhist studies traditionally works on texts, not on images and related rituals, whereas visual culture is traditionally the province of art history, which studies visual objects without much reference to their doctrinal and ritual contexts. While this description of the field may sound more like a caricature today, authors and works trying to bridge successfully the visual, the textual, and the ritual are still a minority. This new book by Pamela Winfield is an ambitious and successful attempt to cross the divide between two of these three traditions, namely, Esoteric Buddhism and Zen (the Pure Land tradition is never mentioned [End Page 481] in the book). This choice is not unjustified: Esoteric Buddhism and Zen do look like polar opposites in terms of doctrines, practices, and attitudes concerning visual matters, with the former emphasizing the proliferation of teachings, rituals, and images and the latter aiming at radical simplification. Winfield focuses her analysis on visual culture—more precisely, on the doctrines and rituals about sacred images (“icons”) as well as on relativizing attitudes about them (“iconoclasm”). In this way, Winfield is able to show how broader philosophical themes (ontology, space, time, semiotics, etc.) contribute to the formation of specific modes to deal with sacred images and how they together constitute discourses about salvation peculiar to Esoteric Buddhism and Zen. As one can imagine, this book tackles a vast and complex material, so the author chose to limit its scope by focusing on the thought of the two founders...

Reviewed by: War and State Building in Medieval Japan Bruce L. Batten War and State Building in Medieval Japan. Edited by John A. Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth. Stanford University Press, 2010. 192 pages. Hardcover $60.00; softcover $19.95. Among the many conference volumes on Japanese history, this one stands out for its brevity and coherence. Perhaps not coincidentally, the two editors are political economists, not historians. Although one of them (Rosenbluth) has published widely on modern Japan, neither editor can claim prior expertise on the subject of this book, which is aptly summarized by its title, War and State Building in Medieval Japan. War and State Building owes its origins to a workshop held in Kyoto in March 2004, which the editors organized to "bridge the divide between history and social science" (p. v). To that end, they invited six historians of medieval Japan: three Americans (Karl Friday, Carol Richmond Tsang, and Thomas Conlan), one Frenchman (Pierre Souyri), and two Japanese (Susumu Ike and Tsuguharu Inaba), each of whom contributes a chapter to the present volume. In this volume, Ferejohn and Rosenbluth apply recent (and not-so-recent) theorizing on state formation to the case of late medieval Japan. The basic argument, à la Charles Tilly, is that in Japan, as in Europe, warfare played a crucial role in the emergence of the modern, territorial state. This will hardly come as a surprise to most readers of this journal; it would be difficult, I think, to find a specialist who disagrees with the notion that warfare was a catalyst to state building in late medieval and early modern Japan. That said, this volume does present a refreshing take on the matter. The editors and several of the contributors (particularly Inaba, Tsang, and Souryi) favor a "bottom-up" approach, focusing on popular movements and resistance rather than the exploits and accomplishments of "great men" such as Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. According to the editors, peasants' "willingness to supply resources for large armies lies at the root of Japan's political unification in the sixteenth century" (p. 4). More generally, "the main story of the emergence of the modern territorial state is a Hobbesian one of distraught peasants exchanging financial and labor resources for military protection" (pp. 3-4). Although this perspective does not deny the role of military elites, it certainly gives commoners an agency lacking in many older accounts of the state-building process. Unfortunately, but perhaps unavoidably, the assertion that commoners submitted to higher authority in exchange for protection remains just that—an assertion. The case studies provide much information about community resistance to daimyo rule, but little evidence of how local actors actually viewed their final submission to military authority. So whether they were "rational peasants" making a conscious choice, as the editors imply, or were simply overpowered, as I would guess, is not clear from the material presented in this book. To be fair, however, it may well be that the historical record is silent on the motivation of non-elites, rendering this point moot. One great strength of War and State Building is its explicitly comparative, multidisciplinary framework. In a sense, one wishes that the editors had gone even further in this regard. For example, the comparisons that Ferejohn and Rosenbluth make with European history are interesting and insightful, but other regions of the world are wholly ignored. The editors also seem to conflate the notion of the "modern, territorial state" with that of the state itself; [End Page 154] there is little recognition that other types of state have existed in Japan, Europe, and elsewhere, often well before the period covered by this book. However, these weaknesses are also strengths, because the focus on modern, territorial state building in Japan and Europe contributes to the book's overall coherence and readability. In any case, the editors are to be congratulated for their bold application of theoretical and comparative perspectives to the study of premodern Japanese history—a field badly in need of such outside stimuli, as I will argue below. This brings me to the six specialized chapters by historians, which can be summarized roughly as follows: Karl Friday, in "They...

Medieval scholar-monks produced and transmitted a massive body of texts known as sacred works or shogyo. This article focuses on the Todaiji monk Sosho (1202-1278), who produced almost five hundred texts. How and for what purposes did a scholar-monk come to generate such a massive body of texts? First, Sosho produced most of his texts in the process of preparing for and participating in state-sponsored debate rituals (rongie). Since scholarmonks' participation in these rituals guaranteed their promotion, they produced their shogyo first and foremost for advancing their positions in the ecclesiastical community. In addition, copying shogyo was the main method of learning and advancing doctrinal studies. The transmission of shogyo also contributed to a significant institutional change in temple society in medieval Japan-the development of cloisters (inge). This article reveals the undeniable importance of liturgical tradition and the resultant production of shogyo in medieval Japan.KEYWORDS: Buddhist debate (rongi)-scholar-monks (gakusho)-Sosho-Todaiji- shogyo-cloisters (inge)(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)In medieval Japan (roughly from the twelfth to the early-sixteenth century), scholar-monks (gakuryo ... or gakusho ...) produced and transmitted various texts (shogyo ...)1 as part of their efforts to establish the authenticity of their doctrinal knowledge, ritual techniques, and cloisters (inge...).2 In this article, I analyze this process by examining texts that the Todaiji ... monk Sosho ... (1202-1278) produced to prepare for participating in Buddhist debate rituals (rongie ...) sponsored by the state.3 Unlike one-time polemical debate, these state-sponsored debate rituals were held annually and provided an elite scholar-monk such as Sosho with opportunities to gain knowledge of Buddhist doctrines and to build his credentials as a scholar. A monk's successful debate performance in state-organized debate rituals not only increased his fame, but also guaranteed his promotion to a high position in the ecclesiastical office of sogo .... In order to prepare for debate, Sosho copied, edited, or compiled vast amounts of shogyo, and he later transmitted these texts to his disciples who also were to attend debate rituals. Furthermore, the transmission of shogyo contributed not only to the education of his disciples but also to his lifelong ambition of reinvigorating Kegon ... studies at his cloister within Todaiji.Despite the voluminous corps of texts that he leftand the significance of his pedagogical and scholarly achievements, Sosho has not attracted major scholarly interest, especially in the English-speaking world, for several reasons. First, there are certain technical difficulties; most of Sosho's shogyo texts have not been published, and still remain in the form of handwritten manu- scripts. In addition, Sosho usually copied these texts very quickly; therefore, he used a rather peculiar shorthand style, which is not easily decipherable to the untrained eye.4 Finally, Sosho was more interested in copying, editing, and commenting on what others had written than authoring his own work. A Todaiji monk once half-jokingly said to me that Sosho was a mere copyist (kopi man). This view, however, is premised on the modern notion of authorship, which is not always applicable to premodern texts.5 In this article, I show that the act of copying, and its products-the texts themselves-facilitated a scholar-monk's desire for academic accomplishment, salvific attainment, and political empowerment.In addition, scholarly paradigms in the field of premodern Japanese religions that are currently dominant tend to neglect or obscure the intellectual and social activities of elite scholar-monks of Nanto6 temples such as Sosho-especially Kuroda Toshio's characterization of and Buddhism (kenmitsu ...). Kuroda largely equates exoteric with doctrinal learning-what elite scholar-monks of Nanto temples devoted their life to-while contrasting it with esoteric Buddhism that focused on thaumaturgical rites (shuho . …

Rituals of Initiation and Consecration in Premodern Japan: Power and Legitimacy in Kingship, Religion, and the Arts. Fabio Rambelli and Or Porath, eds. Religion and Society 87. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. xxiv + 506 pp. $103.99. - Volume 76 Issue 3

Reviewed by: War and State Building in Medieval Japan Suzanne Gay (bio) War and State Building in Medieval Japan. Edited by John A. Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2010. xi, 180 pages. $60.00, cloth; $20.95, paper; $20.95, E-book. From this book’s title, one expects an account of Japan’s two medieval shogunates and their systems of vassalage, with emphasis on conflict as the main vehicle of political change. Instead, the book offers a fresh rationale for Japan’s transformation from medieval to early modern times, utilizing comparative historical and political theories of European origin. An introduction and postscript contain the editors’ provocative if one-dimensional explanation for successful political and territorial consolidation in late sixteenth-century Japan. Between are six essays by historians of Japan who address “the choices made by lords and peasants throughout the medieval period and across different parts of Japan” (p. 11). These vary in the degree [End Page 124] to which they apply the editors’ theoretical framework, but each is illuminating in its own way. John Ferejohn and Frances Rosenbluth first posit a theme of resistance, citing four groups that opposed political incorporation in medieval times: mountain dwellers, pirates plaguing coastal commerce, the “political arm of Buddhism” repelling the government’s encroaching territorial and jurisdictional authority, and the outer daimyō of Kyushu, Shikoku, and remote eastern Honshu who were finally defeated in 1600 at Sekigahara. In their geographical isolation and effective fighting techniques, the first group is likened to Swiss farmers who resisted domination by outside lords. Members of the second group are characterized as resisters preying on commercial ships rather than successful merchant mariner–sea lords in their own right, the more recent scholarly interpretation. At any rate, pirates do not figure again in the volume. The third group included any militarized element within Buddhism, from traditional monasteries like Enryakuji and Negoroji to the grass-roots Lotus and Ikkō leagues. The final of the four groups comprised the domainal lords on the losing side in the Battle of Sekigahara. In this chronologically capacious fashion, the editors identify resistant elements in medieval Japan. Ferejohn and Rosenbluth further contend that, as in Europe, the emergence of the modern territorial state—e.g., the Tokugawa settlement—came about because “once widespread destruction reached an intolerable threshold, ordinary people were willing to pay for large armies” (p. 11), resulting eventually in territorial consolidation. Thus, farmers are assigned agency in a major political transformation, even as the editors acknowledge that farmers’ bargaining leverage varied considerably over time and place. The first and sixth essays, by Karl Friday and Thomas Conlan respectively, focus on the warrior class and do not explicitly amplify the themes laid out in the introduction. Friday depicts the origins of the samurai as emerging from the imperial court in ancient times. He reminds us of the great power of the center to control and reshape the countryside, even as real power gradually shifted to locals. A clear explanation of the complex political and military reality of ancient Japan, this essay should be especially helpful to Europeanists either drawing parallels or positing contrasts. Conlan, examining late medieval warfare, plays down the significance of material technology such as firearms and instead emphasizes organizational technology—the ability to mobilize, train, and supply armies—as crucial to the eventual political consolidation of Japan. His analysis of data on wounds reveals that from theLnin War (1467–77) on, warriors served regularly in established bands as successful provincial governors extended their territorial rule. This is organizational technology harnessed for war, the building and maintaining of a regular fighting force. Conlan’s essay is focused on [End Page 125] aspects of making war from the top, but he does remind us that farmers were providing the necessary revenues, supplies, and manpower. Essays by Susumu Ike and Tsuguharu Inaba are in close harmony with the editors’ farmer-centric perspective. Describing the great range of relationships between lords and retainers in medieval times, Ike characterizes life for ordinary rural people even before 1467 as “chaos,” rhetorically laying the groundwork for a “frustrated farmer” argument. From Masakado’s tenth-century rebellion through Hideyoshi’s unification attempts, he...

Reviewed by: Land, Power, and the Sacred: The Estate System in Medieval Japan ed. by Janet R. Goodwin and Joan R. Piggott Pierre François Souyri Land, Power, and the Sacred: The Estate System in Medieval Japan. Edited by Janet R. Goodwin and Joan R. Piggott. University of Hawai'i Press, 2018. 570 pages. Hardcover, $74.00. The complex subject of Japanese landed estates (shōen) has been studied extensively in Japan over a long period of time. In work from 1906 to 1907 that marks the beginning of modern scholarship on the subject, Nakada Kaoru was the first to try and compare Japanese shōen with English manors and French seigneuries.1 But it was right after the war, following the publication of Ishimoda Shō's Chūseiteki sekai no keisei (The Formation of the Medieval World), that research on estates really flourished;2 during the 1950s and 1960s, most young Japanese researchers working on medieval times were expected to produce a book-length study of a landed estate. In contrast, [End Page 253] scholarship on landed estates in English is quite sparse, and what little is available—including, for example, early work by Asakawa Kan'ichi, a more recent but contested study by Thomas Keirstead, and translations of research by Japanese historians in the Cambridge History of Japan—leaves much about the subject unexplored.3 The volume under review is thus a welcome addition, particularly because it is more than a simple collection of independent studies: enhanced by many meetings, workshops, and discussions among the writers, it is a truly collective endeavor offering a rich variety of perspectives that deftly complement one another. Land, Power, and the Sacred comprises eighteen chapters by American and Japanese historians; while some, such as Ōyama Kyōhei, are very well known, others are newer to the field. Overall the book reads quite smoothly and is intended for a wide audience including "professors who endeavor to teach estates," scholars conducting research in medieval Japanese history and other fields, and students themselves (p. xxxvi). It deals with medieval society in a broad sense (from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries). Roughly half of the chapters focus on the Ōbe estate, which was located in present-day Hyōgo Prefecture (the former Harima Province) and was established by the Nara-based temple Tōdaiji, but the volume is not merely a case study; instead—as I elaborate shortly below—its wide-ranging discussion clearly foregrounds three new main directions taken by shōen scholarship since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Chapter 1, by Joan Piggott, includes a review of the historical literature since the 1970s. Piggott brilliantly synthetizes the crux of Japanese historiographical debates, starting with Nagahara Keiji's vision for shōen history and then examining the contributions of other great historians like Amino Yoshihiko, Kuroda Toshio, Ishii Susumu, and Tabata Yasuko. Among other things, she highlights the rich diversity of Japanese research (which is also evident in the book's extensive bibliography) as well as the quality of the debates between historians that brought an end to the "paddy-centric" view of Japanese estates. She also underlines the importance of local and regional conditions and the shift away from viewing the expansion of the estate system as a process of "privatization." The discussion then turns to the first of the three trends in research that the book highlights: the interest in archaeology and, more generally speaking, topography that Japanese historians seem to have triggered in their Western colleagues. Indeed, Japanese historians are wont to "leave the library and walk the land" in order to understand the local geography of the estate (p. 18). Piggott explains how she once walked the Ōta estate (former Bingo Province; today eastern Hiroshima Prefecture) with Nagahara Keiji, reminding me of my own similar experiences with Ishii Susumu when we visited the Hine estate and with Fujiki Hisashi when we walked with students through the Tara estate. I am not sure that great English or French historians of European manors of the Middle Ages do the same as frequently, but in my view a thorough visual understanding of the land cannot be achieved without this kind of...

This article investigates two issues regarding the Buddhism of premodern Japanese martial arts. The first issue concerns the historical channels through which Buddhist elements were adopted into martial lineages, and the second pertains to the general character of the Buddhism that can be found in the various martial art initiation documents (densho). As for the first issue, while previous scholarship underscored Shugendō (mountain asceticism) as an important factor in the earliest phases of the integration process of Buddhist elements in martial schools, this study focuses on textual evidence that points to what is referred to as “medieval Shinto”—a Shinto tradition that heavily relied on Esoteric Buddhist (Mikkyō) teachings—in scholarship. Regarding the second issue, although numerous studies have already shown the indebtedness of premodern martial schools to Buddhist teachings drawn mainly from the Esoteric Buddhist or Zen traditions, this article sheds more light on the nature of these teachings by drawing attention to the fact that they often emphasize the Buddhist thought of isshin or “One Mind”. The article illustrates how this thought was adopted in premodern martial art texts and in doing so clarifies the reasons why Buddhism was valued in those arts.

One of the more intriguing developments within mediaeval Japanese literature is the incorporation into the teaching of waka poetry of the practices of initiation ceremonies and secret transmissions found in esoteric Buddhism. The main figure in this development was the obscure 13th-century poet Fujiwara Tameaki, grandson of the famous poet Fujiwara Teika and a priest in a tantric Buddhist sect. Tameaki's commentaries and teachings transformed secular texts such as the Tales of Ise and poetry anthologies such as the Kokin waka shu into complex allegories of Buddhist enlightenment. These commentaries were transmitted to his students during elaborate initiation ceremonies. In later periods, Tameaki's specific ideals fell out of vogue, but the habit of interpreting poetry allegorically continued. This book examines the contents of these commentaries as well as the qualities of the texts they addressed that lent themselves to an allegorical interpretation; the political, economic and religious developments of the Kumakura period that encouraged the development of this method of interpretation; and the possible motives of the participants in this school of interpretation. Through analyses of six esoteric commentaries, Susan Blakeley Klein presents examples of this interpretive method and discusses its influence on subsequent texts, both elite and popular.

[Andrew Edmund Goble is Professor of Japanese History and of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon. His recent research has focused on issues of medicine and society in pre-modern Japan. He is most recently the author of “War and Injury: The Emergence of Wound Medicine in Medieval Japan” (Monumenta Nipponica, 2005); “Kajiwara Shōzen (1265-1337) and the Medical Silk Road: Chinese and Arabic Influences on Medieval Japanese Medicine” (In Goble, Robinson and Wakabayashi (eds.), Tools of Culture: Japan’s Cultural, Intellectual, Medical, and Technological Contacts in East Asia, 1000s-1500s, 2009). His manuscript Confluences of Medicine: Exploring Song Chinese Medical Knowledge in Medieval Japan, will be appearing from the University of Hawai’i Press.]

While embryological symbolism pervades Buddhist discourse, it has only recently come to the attention of Buddhist scholarship. The present paper, after briefly discussing the notion of the "five stages of gestation" (tainai goi), focuses on its symbolic expression in medieval Japan—not only in esoteric Buddhism, with the embryological encoding of the "wisdom kings" Aizen and Fudō, but also in medieval Shintō, with the figure of the sun goddess and in Shugendō, a mountain cult aimed at spiritual rebirth.

From the mid-10th century onward, in cases of illness, the Japanese aristocracy relied on new Buddhist healing methods based on spiritual possession techniques. This essay examines the features and procedures according to which monks and mediums operated the healing. This method, of Indian origin, was imported in Japan through Esoteric Buddhism, and was adapted in order to fit healing purposes. The author focuses his analysis on the role played by an invisible “spirit” who acted to catch the ill-causing demon within the patient’s body and expelled this malign entity from it. The article ends with a translation of a unique ritual text entitled Genja sahō 驗者作法, which describes these rituals in detail.

禅と密教・神道 : 聖一派の新発見資料から(新発見大須文庫資料による日本中世禅宗史の転換,パネル,研究報告, 第74回学術大会紀要)

There are many kinds of secrecy and many motivations for them. I have discussed the political and sectarian implications of secrecy in the particular case of relic worship elsewhere (Faure 1999 and 2004), and other contributions to this book examine the relationships of secrecy and power in other areas of pre-modern Japanese society. In medieval Japan, secrecy characterized above all the tradition of esoteric Buddhism. By privileging the secret over the manifest, esoteric Buddhism was led, paradoxically, to privilege certain figures of the sacred, in particular mysterious deities that took precedence over the traditional symbols of Buddhism. As Yamaori Tetsuo (1991, pp. 113-20) has noted, Japanese deities (kami) were initially compared to the Indian buddhas as being symbols of the invisible in contrast to figures of the visible. Whatever one may think of the so-called aniconism of early Buddhism and of the inconceivable transcendence of the Buddha himself, in the concrete reality of the cult, the buddhas are eminently visible, and the main characteristic of their anthropomorphic manifestation is their aura, which symbolizes a world of light. In order to call attention to their transcendence, medieval Japanese Buddhism tended to conceal them, and this led to the notion of “hidden buddhas” (hibutsu 秘仏), whose secret nature, symbolized by their removal and concealment in the inner sanctum, evokes infinite power and potentiality. Japanese art historians, who have often monopolized the concept of hibutsu, have not always been able to distinguish between the circumstantial and the structural factors that led to the development of that ragbag category, nor to discuss its theological and mythological premises.1

Until recently, historical materials that might shed light on the diverse practices and beliefs surrounding the worship of Japanese native deities, kami, in the medieval period were largely unavailable for academic study. Some still remain hidden in temple treasuries or private collections, waiting to be discovered. ‘Medieval Shinto’ is thus a relatively new field of enquiry, but a fruitful and promising one as well. The current revival of this field is based on a decisive departure from earlier scholarship, and the studies of kami worship are now advancing rapidly. This article will give a brief overview of the major terms, definitions and themes in the study of medieval kami worship. First, we shall see how Japanese kami became associated with Buddhist deities. Secondly, we shall find out how the worship of kami became influenced by Esoteric Buddhism and what types of esoteric kami worship had emerged in medieval Japan. We shall briefly touch upon the rituals dedicated to kami, and how the ideas about native deities became reflected in medieval Japanese arts and literature. Finally, this article will introduce several important books and main areas of research regarding this complex but fascinating subject.